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I Could Eat Your Words

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So, how have you managed to cope without my didactic musings for an entire week?
Well, i have brought you, from the cloud enshrouded mountain of my mind, two stone tablets, each containg a new word to add to the english lexicon.
At some point in history, i found it necessary to use the term political economy as an adjective. I invented the term "poli-nomic" to accomplish this. It is, i think, a failure as a word. Just look at that awkward spelling: "poli" as a prefix is so confusing and "nomic" is not a suffix at all. The roots of both of the original words are mutilated. I was trying to improve my linguistic mutant when i came up with the word: econocracy. Econocracy describes a political system whose main purposes and methods are economic. For example, Singapore is an econocratic country. Its political system is organized for the purpose of generating economic growth; its social policy is indistinct from its economic policy. Fundamentally of course, the external power or prestige of any society is determined by its human economy, but an econocracy is organized specifically for the purpose of maximizing its economic potential.
The other word is anthrosystemic. I suppose it could be used as a noun: "anthrosystem", but i prefer the modifier. Its meaning is less clear. Perhaps it is just not as useful. It could be used to apply to any man-made institutional or organizational system, but i think that would make it kind of a Pop term rather than a truly meaningful word. I would like it to be more specific in its usage.
So there you are. Use these words liberally, in your blogs, in your interlocutions and in your idle thoughts so that they may seep in like moisture into arid soil and enrich your discourse. Yes, you too can be as prolix and pedantic as i.

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Things Fall Apart

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My theory is: Saddam Hussein has clones.
And of course, each successive clone is a little dumber than the previous. One clone decided to attack Iran. Another thought April Glaspy said it was okay to invade Kuwait, and yet another was running this war.
What happened to the Circle of Death? The oil trenches dug aroung Baghdad and then set ablaze? What happened to the night vision goggles Rummy was so concerned about? What happened to flooding the Karbala gap, sabotaging oil wells, attacking Israel and making the Tigris and Euphrates rivers run red with the blood of infidels? What happened to the chemicals and the red line outside Baghdad? What happened to "I'm a crazy MoFo with nothing to lose and i'll fight to death..." blah, blah, blah? At least make them put on a good show when the troupe comes to the big city. At this rate we'll be invading Syria by July and Iran by next January, and i'm not ready for the Pax Americana yet; I still have laundry to do.

Does this mean that Ted Koppel has to put away his oversized fatigues and dusty pith helmet now? He looks like the knock-off army man action figure you would get for your birthday when you wanted a G.I. Joe, but your parents were either broke or deferring your desires until christmas, or just didn't know the difference. But we know, Ted. We know.

Thank you for visiting alpha charlie bravo. Especially if you got here by accident via a Google search. But if you did you probably aren't sticking around to read this far. But if you have, we welcome you. Poke around for a while and feel free to come back again.
alpha charlie bravo will be going on hiatus next week, but will return a week from Monday with all new episodes.
Until then, please check out some of the other blogs linked on this page, there on your left, no point your mouse up a bit, there you go.
And click here to read the original press release that announced the auspicious debut of this blog.

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Ars Poetica

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Presently, i'm listening to Donald Rumsfeld, one of our nation's greatest poets, at a D.O.D. press conference get agitated at a reporter's question about the humanitarian conditions in Iraq. I don't know about the rest of the country, but my information tells me that all the city of Nasiryah needs is one mic.
(I'm sorry. I am truly sorry.)

WBEZ had a contest to find a poet to recommend as the next poet laureate of Illinois. Considering that there have only been three Illinois poet laureates and that two of them were Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks, I think having a public contest to find another is misguided. None of the contest offerings that i heard teribbly impressed me and maybe because of this i began to reminisce fondly on some of my own past scribblings. I have pages of verses i composed from around 1995 to 1998 scattered about; not in any particular order or even in one place. Some of them have probably been lost. I consider this to be no significant loss to the world of literature as the majority of them are so bad as to be unreadable and the readable ones are probably incomprehensible. Take a look at the staggering volume of awful, awful "poetry" that litters the electronic landscape. When i was writing, i was writing to get good. I certainly wasn't interested in subjecting the world at-large to these practice sessions. But, some point of discussion during that on-air contest caused me to consider the question: what was the best single line i ever wrote? and could it stand up to a line by one of these contestants? It was probably a line in poem a i wrote for class in college. I rummaged through some old academic documents, found a couple of poems from that class, an essay from another, a syllabus, some lecture notes on Kant, but not what i was looking for. I remembered a couple of other lines from the poem and thought i could improve them, but not unless i found it on paper. I found some others and tweaked them a bit, stayed up late into the night to fix a line here and there, but i never located that assembly of ten lines that became the night's obsession.